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chatquitevoit comments on How I Lost 100 Pounds Using TDT - Less Wrong
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I suspect that I won't find any teas I like that aren't sweet. I prefer my comestibles & potables to be either definitively sweet or definitively not-sweet, and items that have features of one (e.g. a fruit flavor) without being sweet (or while being sweet, in the opposite case) are not pleasant to me.
Interesting. Both my brother and sister have the same phenomenon: they love candy and desserts, but dinner foods that have any element of sweetness (like beets, sweet potatoes, or even sweet-and-sour sauces) gross them out.
You can sweeten most of those teas a little...of course, that means adding calories to something that's essentially calorie-free.
Also, you can use Splenda, for no calories at all, and it tastes just fine. I know some people can get downright militant about how awful the stuff is, but they are the same people who buy organic when the term is essentially meaningless, and they seem to hate the thought that you are "cheating" to get deliciousness. I simply say to them "Er, human technology has progressed to the point where I can have, say, a sweet breakfast without consuming any sugar, and I'm going to do so. Cheating has nothing to do with it." I drink tea with it alllll the time, too. :)
Does it taste the same as sugar? I've found that diet Coke doesn't taste the same to me as regular Coke, and I would prefer non-sweet tea to sweet but weird-tasting tea. Then again, I like unsweetened tea and coffee. To someone who found them really unpalatable, artificial sweeteners would definitely be worth it.
Diet Coke has a long history of not tasting the same as regular Coke. They even made an ad campaign about it (YouTube) in the late '80s. Only Coke Zero is supposed to taste the same.
And fails, unfortunately.
No, Diet Coke doesn't taste the same as regular coke; but why would you want it to? As best I can tell, a preference for the flavor of sugared Coke over unsugared Coke is simply a learned preference like preferring Catsup over Brown Sauce or vice versa. I switched to Diet Coke many years ago, and these days regular Coke tastes wrong and not as refreshingly delicious to me. Stick with it for a while, and you not only get used to it. You come to prefer it.
In less sweet drinks like coffee, I'm not sure I could tell the difference between sugar and other sweeteners. FWIW, I do find that aspartame (Equal) works better in coffee than sucralose (Splenda).
Fair enough - I don't like the syrupyness of regular coke, but I drink diet, although it certainly doesn't taste like real sugar. Although I'd ask if you've used other artificial sweeteners than Splenda, because most taste terrible, but it's an entirely different chemical preparation - sucralose which comes from actual sugar, not dextrose or aspartame which come from tar.
I've always found the "tastes like sugar because it's made from sugar" slogan awfully disingenuous. I mean, yes, it does taste like sugar, and it is made with sugar, but it's a chlorinated sugar compound. The fact that it's safe and tastes like sugar rather than say, rat poison, was hardly a foregone conclusion, and was only discovered in the first place due to a lab mistake that could easily have featured in an obituary. On the other hand, there's no reason a compound made using tar needs to taste bad. In terms of elements, there's nothing in tar that isn't in sugar (at least in significant quantities, provided the tar is clean.)
Also, dextrose is a naturally occurring sugar.
Typical mind fallacy, revved up with a claim that people who say they don't resemble you have something wrong with them-- the latter probably needs its own name, probably something to do with preventing feedback.
As it happens, I think Splenda tastes inedibly vile, unlike other artificial sweeteners I've tried, which merely taste somewhat off.
I do eat some organic food, in the hopes that it will taste better, but there's also some conventional food (including highly processes stuff) that I like and eat.
Here'a an idea that I've been thinking about for a while, any thoughts? Epistemic status is uncertain:
Producers are using the buzz-word "organic" as a form of market segmentation for price discrimination. Since organic food is more expensive and marketed at richer consumers, it is not surprising that producers make an extra effort to improve the quality, even if this quality improvement has nothing to do with the agricultural practices. Consumers are rightly noticing that food marketed as organic tastes better, and are demanding more of it. This leads to a vicious cycle that reduces the efficiency of agriculture, which obviously has implications for global warming, deforestation etc. Everyone are following their incentives correctly, but we end up in an inferior equilibrium because of a self-fulfilling prophecy which forces everyone to use the signal "organic" when they mean "good quality".
Um. Basically, producing organic food forces extra expenses upon you, so the organic food has higher costs. I am not convinced about "higher quality".
No, it doesn't.
I even ran a blind test on eggs -- bought some supermarket-brand generic eggs, and bought some organic free-range extra-special extra-expensive eggs and did a blind test cooking the eggs a couple of different ways. I couldn't tell the difference.
For fruits and veggies, there are a lot of factor which influence their quality and none of them have anything to do with being "organic" or not.
I've read about other blind tests which found that people can't tell the difference between fancy eggs and ordinary ones. I have felt a little off after eating very cheap eggs for several days in a row.
I've seen consensus that free-range beef tastes better.
While I said something nice about the veggies to a farmer at the farmer's market, he said that the big difference was freshness rather than better varieties or growing conditions.
Well, the standard local supermarket beef and beef imported from Australia taste clearly different, though "better" is a matter of preferences. There are probably at least three differences between them: (1) Breed; (2) Feed (mostly or solely grass-fed vs. mostly or solely corn-fed); (3) Physical exercise (real free-range vs. limited free-range vs. factory farming).
I agree that there are a lot of factors which influence the quality of fruit and veggies, and that they are not causally related to whether the vegetables are organic. However, I am convinced that there is some correlation. For example, I expect that it would be difficult to sell unripe mass produced tomatoes as organic.
One objective thing I have noticed is the quality of milk. I have an Aeroccino-machine for frothing milk. When I use milk from Whole Foods (an expensive all-organic food store), it consistently creates a great foam, whereas if I use non-organic milk from a normal supermarket, it usually completely fails. It would be great if someone else who owns an Aeroccino machine could try to replicate this claim at home..
I expect that there is a simple explanation that has nothing to do with pesticides, for example that Whole Foods has a better logistics system that keeps the milk properly refrigerated at all times. However, my point is only that many customers will note that the organic milk from Wholefoods foams, whereas the non-organic doesn't.
There's a study that suggests that Splenda causes a change in blood glucose levels: http://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/early/2013/04/30/dc12-2221
Not consuming sugar isn't the end goal.
It's true that artificial sweeteners mean you can get a sweet taste without consuming calories. Beware the conclusion that they therefore don't cause you to gain weight or have other negative health effects though. There's plenty of evidence to the contrary.
I agree that eating healthily doesn't mean having to deprive yourself of all delicious foods. Sadly artificial sweeteners seem to be quite problematic, though some types may be less bad than others.
SIgh......I've certainly seen all the 'evidence to the contrary', or at least a significantly representative amount.
This is the long and short of it: artificial sweeteners give taste, not satiety, so you won't be as full as you would if you ate sugar, hence may eat more. Also, if you overestimate the number of calories you're 'saving' using sweeteners, you'll undoubtedly end up eating more, and potentially gaining weight. It's the stereotypical "Ooh, I drank a diet coke instead of a real one, saved 200 calories, so I can have a donut!"
Conclusion: pay attention to EVERYTHING you're eating, keeping in mind that you DO have a precondition of 'how much food you need', and do so in a manner that consciously minimizes your biases. It's not that hard, but most people don't take such a holistic approach, and I've not ever seen it specified as a factor in the 'studies' on artificial sweeteners. So, the studies are correct, per se, but you and I can hopefully be a little smarter than that....it's pretty much a problem of overcoming internal bias by acting on as complete info as possible.